Lenten Scratches: Water Antics

As you know, Baxter has this thing for drinking from the spigot in the bath tub. He sits on the edge of the tub patiently waiting for me to walk by the door, so that he can call me into the bathroom to turn on the spigot for his drink. He places his head under the stream and drinks the water that rolls off of his head onto the tub floor. Of course, this means that the gets quite wet from the whole maneuver, but he obviously thinks it’s worth it. He keeps coming back for more. He doesn’t see a problem. I, on the other hand, have a problem with the aftermath of Baxter’s hydration technique.

I try to wait until he is finished with his slurping up the H2O, so that I can stop him before the big splash. If I’m alert and quick, I can pin him down and dry him off with a towel before he sets off on his merry way. However, if I miss his cue that he’s done with the drink, then I have to deal with the splashes on the floor, the walls, the rugs and anything else in shot of his vigorously shaking head. Sometimes I think he tries to fool me purposely, so that he can get a shot at me. When my back is turned, he leaps out of the tub, shakes and runs to escape my flurry of unpleasant words and the flying towel that follow. He has made it a game. Let’s see who can outsmart whom. Will Baxter be high and dry from the alpha cat’s Turkish towel off, or will I, and my surroundings, be wet and offended by his mischievous antics? At this point, I think the game is tied.

Our God plays with water as well. He separated the sea for the Israelites to escape Egypt. He brought water for the people from the rock in the desert. After the exile, Ezekiel speaks of God’s salvation as life-giving water flowing throughout Israel refreshing the land, and John the Baptist calls the people to repentance through his baptism in the Jordan. Finally, the risen Lord Jesus commissions His followers to baptize all nations “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Water is a common medium for God’s touching our lives and renewing them.

He used water when He first touched us with new life at our baptisms. Through this primal ritual of our Christian life, God gave us all the basic elements of faith—overcoming sin, identifying us as His children, commissioning us as priest, prophet and king to carry on God’s work in the world. Baptismal waters cleanse and give birth, and by recalling our baptisms, they replenish our spirits when we feel dried up and withered by the desert of our godless world today. “Never forget your baptism and its meaning for your life.” This is the message of Lent each year. We want it to wash over us again and again, so that it will soak into us and our way of living. Forgiven as sinners, loved as children, and commissioned as disciples set the landmarks in the Lenten landscape, and a river runs through this promised land like the Jordan river through the holy land. Its source is the waters of our baptisms into Christ’s life.

Don’t try to dry off too quickly from these waters. Too often we forget that we are baptized believers with a dignity and responsibility that is divine by adoption. We act like everyone else — arrogant, competitive, self-centered, self-indulgent, uncaring. We are called to be more. Wake up to who you are and what you can do in God’s name. Splash in the life giving waters where you died with Christ to rise with Him to new life. It’s God’s trick to save you and recreate the world through you. So what if you get a little wet. Just take a cue from Baxter and shake a little water on others to invite them to play along. That’s how the world is converted, not with crusades but with clever ways to invite others to take a drink, get a little wet, and enjoy how God saves us.

Lenten Scratches: Finding a Peaceful Perspective

Baxter was making a fuss the other evening before bedtime. He was banging around the house, dashing in and out of the rooms. He was staring at something in the hallway that set him off. At first I thought it might be a mouse or a spider that got into the house. He toys with such critters if he can, running after them, trapping them or trying to throw them with his paw, and finally, he leaves them for more exciting distractions. But this manic episode was different. He wouldn’t stop. He kept getting more and more excited. He wasn’t giving up on whatever it was that peaked his interest until it was conquered, or I removed it.

Because I wanted to get to bed, I decided to get to the bottom of this ruckus. At first, I couldn’t figure it out. No signs of a critter, no body parts left anywhere, no strange sounds except Baxter’s, so what could be setting him in such a frenzy? Then I spotted it. The strange intruder who set Baxter on his mad antics around the house was a twisty-tie. Yes, you read that correctly. One of those little coated metal wires used to close garbage bags or plastic food bags was the source for his crazy runs, jumps and grunts. He was so easily set off by something that amounted to nothing. A flip of the waste can lid, and it was all over.

We sometimes get excited by the smallest and silliest things as well. A garbage bag left in the house, dishes left on the table, five minutes late leaving for work, a traffic light turning red, eye glasses misplaced, a cell phone left in the office, a greeting missed by a friend or colleague, whatever it might be, we use it as the earthquake to set off our personal tsunami. We let our anger and frustration wash over everything and everyone in our path at times like these, and we start drawing cosmic conclusions about the matter with words like “always,” “never,” “why” and the accusatory “YOU!” We blow whatever happened out of proportion, and make it a personal affront to us, to the responsibility and respect due us. No reasoning or conciliatory talk gets to us at such times. We just want to ventilate and feel justified in doing so. Like Baxter when he is strung out, we are simply out of control.

So what do we do about such scenes when they occur? We can’t do another take and discard the first reaction, even if we want to do so. Once the words are spoken and the theatrics are played there is no erasing them. We have to deal with the consequences and learn from them.

Dealing with the consequences means we want to repair any damage our harsh words created. “I’m sorry” goes a long way to fill in the gaps our rash judgment created. It’s an invitation to give me another chance, to start over, to forget the drama and live normally again. What our anger shut down in our relationship with another, our apology reopens for the free flow of exchanging thoughts, feelings, concerns and beliefs. We begin to learn again, and what we learn is perspective. We made a mountain out of a mole hill. We forgot the big picture of the person before us. We reduced the moment and the relationship to what just happened, rather than seeing it as a part of a history of happenings that constitutes a person’s full character and our relationship with them.

Lent is a good time to mend the tears we have created between each other and between ourselves and God. “I’m sorry” is a simple sentence with profound meaning and effect. It diffuses our sometimes over-charged lives together, and puts the pieces back into the places where they belong. It helps us appreciate each other for the unique goodness we each bring to the task of living. It calms, heals and re-creates our love for each other. The monsters we imagine are shown for what they are, little annoyances that are best discarded.

It’s just a “twisty-tie,” Baxter. Go back to sleep. We all need to rest in the Lord this Lent.

Lenten Scratches: Fasting

Baxter should be on a diet. He does eat “weight control” food, but all it seems to do is maintain his portly physique. I have tried lowering the amount he eats each day to below the half cup allotment, but then he becomes intolerable to live with. Between the mournful cries and the incessant rubs on my legs and paws to my arms, I can’t do anything else but give him attention. Of course, that’s the point of these antics. “Wear him down until he can’t stand it any longer and gives up more grub.” Cats are always conniving to get their way. And as his weight maintenance shows, Baxter usually does get his way.

Dieting is a part of our culture in America. It is constantly changing with the latest fad diet, but it never seems to go away. Maybe because the statistics tell us we are overweight as a nation, we are always looking for the next way to fix it. But we want to do so without any pain and sacrifice, without any significant changes to our life style, while retaining all the pleasures fattening foods give us minus the calories. We keep looking for the “perfect” remedy for our weight problem, but none seems to last. So we go from fad diet to fad diet without losing a pound, but confident that the simple solution is just around the next weight loss commercial.

Lent does not call us to diet. It calls us to fast. There’s a big difference. We diet to become physically thinner, but we fast to become spiritually richer. We fast to heighten our awareness of many aspects of our life where God has a point to make for us. Fasting shows us that we don’t need all that we think we need, not all the food or possessions or pleasures we think make us happy. We need less because they contain so much more than we take account of when we use them. Savoring a meal makes it last longer and satisfies us more than fast food consumption that quells the hunger in ten minutes, but brings it back in two hours. Having a few quality products around to use or wear allow us to appreciate workmanship where human labor cooperates with the Creator rather than mass production that often makes the worker into a machine for profit. Picking one’s pleasures allow us to absorb their beauty and gratification more deeply as a sign of God’s goodness and grace, rather than simply indulging ourselves in fleeting satisfactions than wear off quickly, leaving us looking for more.

We fast to intensify our appetites so that less can truly be more, as we grow to understand that a rich life comes with the quality it holds rather than the quantity it amasses. We don’t need as much as we think we do, but we do need more from what we have by experiencing it as God’s gift given for us to know how generous God is. Finally, fasting comes down to making us grateful for what life brings us, even the bitter fruit, for it all nourishes our soul through the mystery of how God saves us.

Baxter should go on a diet, but he probably won’t. He likes the satisfaction food gives him too much, and he doesn’t intend to lose it. He is a slave to his creaturely desires. We need to fast a little this Lent from food or possessions or creaturely pleasures to free us from such desires and to know how good God is to us. Then we will be ready for the glorious feast of Easter, where God took a criminal, thought the least among us, and showed Him as the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Lenten Scratches: Growing Older

Baxter had a birthday a couple of weeks ago. Actually, it was his assigned birthday. I assigned it to him. You see, the shelter where I got Baxter told me he was about four months old when he came to my house, but they didn’t know the exact day of his birth. So I counted back four months, and looked for a date I would remember around that time. I picked February 14, Valentine’s Day, as Baxter’s official birthday. I count his age from that day each year. He is eleven this year.

I have noticed a few changes in Baxter as the years have gone by. He feigns to scratch the furniture less (no front claws). His play periods are much shorter than they were when he was a young cat. But one thing has increased in Baxter’s routine. He is much more affectionate in his later years. Almost daily now, often twice a day, Baxter crawls upon my lap, purring away, and circles around until he finds the spot where he lies down for a short nap. He gets stroked on the back and a belly scratch, and he then usually falls asleep for a few minutes, sometimes soundly, and sometimes I fall asleep as well. Then, all of a sudden, he jumps up, gets down from my lap, and goes to one of his many favorites spots for a long term rest. The brief interlude with me seems less about sleeping and more about connecting. He just wants to be sure I’m still close to him, that we share our living space, and that I’m not going any where to leave him behind. In his older years, Baxter has come to appreciate companionship and knowing he’s not alone.

That is something we all need to ponder as we count our passing birthdays as well. It would look a little ridiculous to try to get into the lap of our close friends and family. We have accumulated too many pounds over the years for that. Yet, it is anything but silly to appreciate the closeness the years have brought as our lives together gather more and more memories. That is how we grow close, living together long enough to share memories. The experiences may not always be pleasant ones. Intimacy isn’t created only by the triumphs and proud moments we share. It also comes through the defeats and failures we have known together, using our shared expressions of pain and sorrow to divide the burden between us and support each other in the process. When we add it all up we get a summary of the human condition, and if we reflect on our stories a bit, we gain a little wisdom from the accumulated mix we share.

Jesus’ disciples discovered this closeness with Him as they realized what He had done for them in sharing His life, death and resurrection. Four of them wrote their reflections on this story in what we know now as the gospels. They all carried forward the memories in their preaching, teaching and sharing of the Spirit with others interested in His story. Disciples are intimate companions of the Lord Jesus. He knows them, and they seek to know Him. The memories of their lives are intertwined with His so closely that their stories come together. A disciple’s life is more than his or her biography. It unveils how Christ is living still with His disciples today — magnifying their joys as a reflection of God’s glory, sharing their pain and loss as the extension of His own cross, and transforming the whole of their lives as the promise of new and eternal life. Disciples share their lives with the life of the Lord Jesus, and the memories that are created generate a closeness with God that we come to count on and trust.

We are all a year older from last Ash Wednesday, and our life journeys will continue to add years until they end. Growing older doesn’t have to be a threat to us, if we come to appreciate the closeness with God and each other we have gained through the years. Lent is a good time to take stock of this closeness, and to take steps to grow closer still. Take the time to sift through the memories of your life to uncover the divine companion who was with you all along. He is with you still. Invite Him into the lap of your life and rest assured in His love.

Lenten Scratches: Reading the Subtle Signs

I was away for a week recently, and during that break, a friend of mine gave me a book about cats. It presented questions that any cat owner would want to ask his or her cat. For instance, “What does it mean when your eyes are dilated and your ears are laying back?” The answer: the cat is anxious and upset about something, ready to run or pounce. On a contrary note, what does it mean when Baxter is fully stretched out on his back, sleeping soundly? Answer: this is a sign that he feels safe and secure. After reading the whole book with all its questions, I concluded that Baxter is one happy cat with little anxiety and much contentment.

Too bad we don’t have such a book for each other; a guide on how to read the signs we give about how the day is going, what our moods are, what brings us joy or causes us stress and frustration. However, after a while, we do learn some of these signals if we pay attention. We get to know what sets each other off. We can learn the connections between what happens, or what we make happen, and how others respond. We learn what buttons to push in each other to make us happy or sad, secure or anxious, peaceful or angry. Sometimes we may misread the moment, but for the most part, after we have lived with each other long enough and care enough to be concerned about the other’s responses, we figure it out. It is a key to living together.

God gives off signs to us as well. In fact, there is also a book that helps us interpret these signs. It’s called the Bible. As we enter into Lent this week, we need to take note of what the signs of God are in our lives and our world, and how to interpret them. Taking time to look for them because we care about our faith, and making room in our busy schedules to learn more about how to understand them is a vital part of our Lenten renewal. Two things can help in this regard. First, we need to pay attention to the signs. God is often subtle in His messages to us. Rarely do they come in lightning bolts or extraordinary visions. They come with the twists of the day, the conversations we share, the routine prayers we say. With the crowded lives we live, we are often just going from one thing to another, going through the motions to get on with it, and we miss the quieter messages, the signs of grace in our midst. To get God’s point, we need to slow down and be quiet.

Second, we need to read the book. The Bible is a compendium of thousands of years of people’s experiences of God expressed in various literary forms — stories, histories, laws, poems, letters, and special pieces. As we come to understand and appreciate these treasures through the lens of our tradition of faith, we see that God’s work of loving and saving us continues today in our lives and world. The scriptures lay out the track record of God’s ways, to help us recognize and understand the continuing signs of His presence and power today.

It is not just the ways of cats that appear mysterious to us. God’s ways are much more profoundly mysterious, and so they are often missed or dismissed as unintelligible. Take the time to stop, read, reflect and understand these ways a little more fully this Lent. There’s an added bonus for us in this Lenten exercise. As we learn to understand God’s signs better, we learn to live with each other more carefully and appreciate each other more fully.

Baxter's Cat Charm

Cats are real charmers, and Baxter is no exception. When he wants something, he really works at buttering me up. For instance, feeding time is grooming time, and I am the object of his attention and affection. He rubs up against my pant leg with a long, drooling meow, and then he sits with longing eyes, begging for relief from his feigned starvation. Of course, once he gets what he wants, he forgets about me and concentrates on the real object of his charm, his stomach. I am left with pant legs covered with cat hair.

We can do the same to each other, but in more subtle and devious ways. We can use each other to get what we want. Maybe it's a new job or a promotion; maybe it's a personal favor; maybe it's our desire to be among the popular and influential. We can use our relationships to flatter each other's ego. Then we give another person what he or she wants whether it is right or not, or we tell others what they want to hear whether or not it is the truth. Whatever it takes is what we offer to get what we want from them. We play an unspoken game with each other that appears as one thing on the surface but is another underneath. What appears to be esteem, respect and appreciation is really a disguise for self-centeredness and selfish interests. The test for this kind of deception happens when either party in the relationship changes positions or finds another person who might serve their desires better. The relationship dissolves, and what was thought to be genuine affection is revealed as simply convenient and manufactured human dynamics.

God is the test for genuine love and honest closeness in our human connections. God's love has no agenda but the good of the other. God grows closer to us by dealing with whatever we dish up in our lives. Whether we are faithful or sinful, whether we succeed or fail, win or lose, God remains constant in His intentions with us and for us. He seeks the best for us. He wants us to thrive and grow. He lifts us in His love to see ourselves differently, to see that we are valuable and esteemed for who we are as God's children. We are precious in His sight no matter our condition. We don't have to gain or lose a thing to merit God's love. God made the connection from the first moment of our existence, and while we may ignore or disavowal the relationship from our side for what we think is a better, more self-serving agenda, God stays where He has always been, loving us for the person He created us to be, without condition or reservation. God's charm comes from this unwavering constancy to seek our best and transform our worst by His healing and forgiveness.

Too bad we don't charm each other this way, instead of all the games we play to gain each other's favor. We love each other but often with so many strings attached that we act like puppeteers, trying to make each other do and say what we want for our advantage. Our charm is often deceptive. God's charm is loving, true and good. Trust in what God can do for you.

Baxter's Fan Following

Baxter doesn’t seem to be a fan of any team in any sport. He watches some of the games with me, but with a disinterest that often gives way to full out sleep. No cheering meows, no jumping up in excitement, no bad chirps for a bad play, he just lies there wondering, I think, “What is all the fuss about?” A pinch of cat nip or, better still, a bowl of kibble, and he’s full tilt ready to do battle for the spoils. But a contest on some field of play produces little to no reaction from him. Except, of course, if I yell too loudly for some fabulous play or fouled up performance, then Baxter jumps out of his stupor, and once he realizes I am the source of the noise, turns in disgust to resume his shattered dream in peace once again. It takes a lot to be a fan; more than Baxter wants to invest.

A fan must be enthusiastic. He or she is emotionally invested in the team they support. A great game can give a lift to the whole day, and conversely, a bad game puts a damper on the rest of one’s waking hours. A fan isn’t merely “interested” in the game. The day revolves around this event. The energy builds as the anticipation mounts. That’s why there is a ritual to the pre-game activities — tailgating, bands and fight songs, team gear, meeting up with fellow fans. It all contributes to the hype and charges up the faithful.

Which leads to the second quality of a true fan, he or she is loyal. A fair weather fan is no fan at all. The test of one’s blood line for a team is how you act when the team is in a slump. While you might get upset and want to fire the coach or strangle a certain player, you don’t walk away from the team. You stay with them through thick and thin, despite frustrations and disappointments, when the statistics are negative and the record shows it, when they do stupid things that lose the game. A true fan stands by them, and starts over with all the hype for the next game. How can someone do this, especially when the slump becomes a slide that seems to have no bottom to it? They never lose hope. The next play, the next game, the next season will turn it around, and true to this hope, he or she stands by, stays with, cheers on the team.

God needs fans in our world today. It sometimes seems like He’s losing the games of life with so much of the culture of death all around us. The right to an abortion remains the law of the land, as does capital punishment in many places. The frail elderly are often seen as a burden rather than precious pieces of fine, aged humanity. The poor are blamed for their condition rather helped out of it, and world peace is often dismissed as the fantasy of the naïve rather than the only practical course for humans to thrive. God is behind all of these contests for respecting and uplifting human life, but sometimes He must wonder where all of His fans have gone. So little cheering for these causes is often heard, or if it is heard, the cheers come from fair weather fans who pick and choose when and what they will support on God’s team. We are against abortion but for capital punishment. We are concerned for the elderly, but the poor are on their own. Peace is for the radicals, but war is for the patriots. Thinking this way is like cheering for pass plays but not for runs in football, or concentrating on the pitching game but forgetting about dropped balls in the outfield. A true fan supports the team in every aspect of its play, appreciates that each position contributes to the game effort, and remembers that usually only a fully balanced squad can sustain itself all the way to a championship.

God needs enthusiastic and loyal fans in His game of saving human life in all its conditions. Fans expect the team to be in condition, play smart, and give it their all. Our Trinitarian God always does that. We have to do our part in showing that we stand by, stay with and cheer on all God’s efforts in our world. We can’t give up, for the season for this sport is all that remains of human history. The game rituals are the sacraments we celebrate to prepare and strengthen us for the contest. The championship trophy is life everlasting. So stay with God’s team and cheer on His victory over sin and death in all its contests.

Baxter, wake up!